Published 6:23 pm, Friday, January 11, 2013

The White House's novel online system for allowing citizens to petition the administration on any number of causes has led to various unintended consequences: petitions to secede from the United States; for Vice President Joe Biden to star in a reality show; and for the government to disclose its secret archives on extraterrestrials.

Now there is a petition to designate the Roman Catholic Church as a hate group for its opposition to gay rights, and it may wind up generating almost as many press releases as signatures.

The “We the People” petition, filed on Christmas Day, was prompted by Pope Benedict XVI's yearend address to Vatican administrators in which he denounced gay marriage as a threat to Western civilization.

The petition blasts Benedict for “hateful language and discriminatory remarks” and for implying “that gay families are sub-human.” The petition says the Roman Catholic Church “fits the definition of a hate group as defined by both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.”

By Monday, the anti-Catholic petition had more than 2,200 signatures, well short of the 25,000 needed by Jan. 24 to reach the threshold for consideration by administration officials. (The federal government does not designate hate groups; it only prosecutes certain hate crimes.)

But conservative Catholics were leveraging the petition to highlight their opposition to President Barack Obama.

The Catholic News Agency published a story quoting Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council — which gained notoriety when it was designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010 — saying the petition reveals an “underlying agenda” to “stigmatize any disapproval of homosexuality at all and essentially to silence us.”

Catholic Advocate, a lobbying group with ties to the Republican Party, followed with an email blast asking for emergency donations to “help us launch an all-out campaign against the Obama administration's hateful, secular agenda.”

Thomas Peters, a conservative activist who blogs at CatholicVote.org, asked that the White House “declare once and for all that it does NOT consider the Catholic Church to be a 'hate group.'”

The Anti-Defamation League's national director, Abraham Foxman, called the petition's claim “outrageous and offensive” and an “irresponsible” use of its name.